September 18, 1998
Volume XLV, Number 4
Community-Based Projects Help Scholars Build Public Support
With backing from some federal agencies, more scientists look to local groups to help plan research agenda
By Colleen Cordes
CHICAGO
Cambodian refugees scarred by torture are
among the 10,000 low-income elderly and disabled
immigrants who live in three north-side
neighborhoods here -- Uptown, Edgewater, and
Rogers Park.
conducted by or with, and for, communities. It also
includes scientists and students, so that it often (but
not always) involves academe.
Last year, researchers at Loyola University of
Chicago, and members of two community groups
working with them, found that the Cambodians were
once more facing traumatic circumstances.
Such work now accounts for a minute
fraction of the total amount that government,
industry, and foundations spend on research. But
community-based research is beginning to generate
attention in high places. For one, it has been the
subject of discussions at the White House Office of
Science and Technology Policy. Neal F. Lane, the
office's new director, has urged scientists to better
explain to their communities how science serves the
public.
In a prime example of a fledgling field
known as community-based research, the researchers
and their partners showed that a threatened cutoff of
federal welfare benefits would devastate many of the
refugees and other immigrants, and strip tens of
millions of dollars from the local economy.
After the Chicago Sun-Times publicized the
study, Philip Nyden, a Loyola sociologist, got a call
from a powerful state Senator who represented part of
the area, and who was worried about the situation.
Mr. Nyden referred him to the two
community groups that had requested the study and
had helped plan and publicize it -- roles that local
groups take on under the community-based model.
Within a few weeks, the Illinois legislature passed a
bill authorizing $ 10-million in state money to ease
the impact on both elderly and disabled immigrants
and local businesses.
The Policy Research Action Group, a
consortium of four local universities and more than
20 community groups that Mr. Nyden heads, is a
leader in community-based research -- studies
A Minute Fraction
With universities under unprecedented
pressure to prove a public payoff for the vast sums of
federal and state funds they spend, advocates say
community-based research should be part of the
answer.
They say the power of such research to meet
the needs of ordinary Americans -- especially
disadvantaged citizens whose needs are most
desperate -- could provide one new rationale for the
huge public expenditures on academic research, now
that the old rationale -- the Cold War -- is dead.
"When you bring research to the level of
people, they're going to have a much better idea of
what science can do for them," says Anne C.
Petersen, former deputy director of the National
Science Foundation and now a senior vice-president
of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. Taxpayers who
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take part in community-based studies, she says,
"know very well what they're getting for their
money."
Some scientists are skeptical about the new
model. It sounds good, they say, but well-meaning
researchers may be manipulated by community
activists with a strong ideological bias, who may try
to include loaded questions in the studies. There's
also a danger, scientists say, that a small but vocal
minority may set itself up as speaking for "the
community."
"You say 'community-based research' and it
sounds like apple pie," says Stanley Rothman, who
directs Smith College's Center for the Study of Social
and Political Change. "But it depends on who's
baking it," and on the "quality of the ingredients that
go into it."
Including a community in research on an
issue that directly affects it, and involving
undergraduates in interesting research, are important
goals, he acknowledges. But the main criterion for
financing a research project, he says, should be the
proposal's scientific quality.
"I don't care if it's local, shmokal, dokal, or
pocal," he says. "Let's do it if it's good research."
Proponents of community-based research say
it is, in many ways, a reinvention of a venerable old
model -- land-grant colleges. Their original mission
included working closely with communities to meet
their research needs. The new model, they say,
emphasizes community participation in research,
allowing a wide range of both rural and urban citizens
to help initiate studies, carry them out, and decide
how to use the results.
Still, many scientists who work with
communities note that their research faces criticism
from some colleagues. They're sometimes accused,
they say, of not doing "real science," or of promoting
"scare science," skewed by emotion.
Balancing the Pressure
In their own defense, some scientists point to
the intense pressure on academic scientists to make
businesses their research partners. Similar issues of
objectivity apply to those studies, and working with
community groups is one way colleges can balance
that pressure, the researchers say.
Mary E. Northridge, an assistant professor of
epidemiology and environmental-health sciences at
Columbia University, works closely with West
Harlem Environmental Action Inc., an advocacy
group. Together, they have studied the links between
childhood asthma and air quality in Harlem, including
allergens from cockroaches and rodents, and diesel
fumes from heavy traffic and bus depots. She has
helped train teenage members of the group to collect
data.
Yes, she says, the scientists who work with
community groups come to care about the people the
groups represent. But that makes them more intent
upon keeping up the rigor of their science. "When
you do care, you care about the work being good,"
says Ms. Northridge, editor of The American Journal
of Public Health.
Universities themselves have much to gain
from seeking more support for community-based
studies, proponents say. The research, they point out,
often involves graduate and undergraduate students,
and so it can unite all three academic missions -research, teaching, and service -- in creative ways that
enliven each one.
"What we're finding is that for many college
students, this kind of learning gives meaning to their
educations," says Barbara Lieb, a senior researcher
for the Education Department's Office of Educational
Research and Improvement.
A Worldwide Network
A new study by the non-profit Loka Institute,
which receives support from Kellogg, chronicles the
movement nationally. Loka, based in Amherst, Mass.,
promotes broader public participation in planning and
executing the nation's research agenda, and is
organizing a worldwide network of researchers and
organizations interested in community-based studies.
Its rough estimate suggests that about $ 10million of the $ 170-billion spent on U.S. research
and development in fiscal 1995, from all sources,
went to community-based studies, which it describes
as those that focus on issues identified by grassroots
or public-interest groups, labor unions, or local
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government, and that involve
conducting the research.
the groups in
Richard E. Sclove, the Loka Institute's
executive director, says the size of the gap shows a
"striking
mismatch
between
well-endowed,
mainstream research" -- driven by the federal
government, business, and universities -- "and the
urgent needs of communities."
Academe's skills could indeed help
community groups, says Carlos R. DeJesus, executive
director of Latinos United, a group in Chicago. "The
work that we do would be infinitely enhanced if we
had the brilliant minds at universities come in and do
work that's not only relevant to their own research
interests, but that's socially relevant to the group," he
says.
Latinos United, in partnership with the Policy
Research Action Group, the University of Illinois at
Chicago, and a state housing coalition, carried out a
recent study that showed that few Hispanic people
were benefiting from federal housing subsidies. The
study helped the group win a lawsuit against federal
and local agencies.
Few Incentives
Right now, financial and professional
incentives are few for institutions and researchers to
pursue community-based research.
Few federal programs -- all of them relatively
new and small -- encourage or require researchers to
set up partnerships with communities. The
Departments of Education, of Housing and Urban
Development, and of Health and Human Services,
and the Environmental Protection Agency, support
such work.
Ms. Petersen, of the Kellogg Foundation,
would like to see the National Science Foundation
join that list. The N.S.F., she says, has a "superb track
record" of developing and evaluating innovative
models for research and education. With a welldesigned pilot study, she says, it could do the same
for community-based studies.
At the federal level, one of the strongest
pushes for community-based research is coming from
the National Institute of Environmental Health
Sciences, under the leadership of its director, Kenneth
Olden. Part of the National Institutes of Health, it
supports a range of research related to "environmental
justice." Such studies look for links between -- and
solutions to -- the higher rates of disease and death
and the higher levels of pollutants in poor
communities.
The agency's awards in that area require
researchers to work with local groups. Some allow
the groups to take the lead on a grant. Community
leaders help design most of the studies, and help
researchers carry out the public-health efforts that
result.
Public-health goals, Dr. Olden says, can't be
achieved without such collaboration. "The public
really ought to be involved from the very beginning"
in developing such studies, he argues.
But there are several disincentives for a
researcher to embark upon community-based work -including the local and even national controversies
that may ensue.
Ask Marvin Zelen, a professor of statistical
science at Harvard University's School of Public
Health. In the early 1980s, he helped conduct a nowfamous study of the unusual rate of childhood
leukemia in Woburn, Mass., and its relationship to
the dumping of toxic wastes near drinking wells
there. He testified to Congress about the results of the
study, which was based, in part, on data collected by
hundreds of local volunteers.
"I think if the chemical industry had had their
druthers, they would have bombed my house," Mr.
Zelen says. "We kind of wrecked the fund-raising
efforts of the School of Public Health for a while."
Scientists also say community-based research
often takes more time -- and sometimes more money
-- than they originally assume it will. And a local
focus requires researchers to be more creative in
translating the results into a publishable academic
article.
That can make such research risky for
someone like Ms. Northridge, who is not yet tenured,
she notes. Because of the goodwill generated in the
local area, academic administrators often praise
researchers for their community studies, she says. But
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will they be penalized for concentrating on such
work? "You're taking a career risk," she says. "We're
all watching to see if we're going to be promoted and
supported."
think, we can't understand what's happening to us,"
Mr. Wilson says.
"We have to involve the people whose lives
are involved."
If some scientists fear a scarcity of career
rewards for treating communities as equal partners in
their research, local leaders say that for communities,
the rewards of traditional academic studies are clearly
lacking. Communities have too often been burned,
says Mr. DeJesus of Chicago's Latinos United, by
researchers who used them as little more than data
points.
No Concrete Benefits
"There's been a history of universities coming
into a community and researching it to death -research that was purely for the scholarly purpose of
the university, and may not have presented any
concrete benefits to the community," he says. "We
were more the object of the research. So there never
was any true partnership."
Larry Wilson, of Yellow Creek Concerned
Citizens, in Bell County, Ky., agrees. Communitybased research, he says, means that the people with
the Ph.D.s are finally recognizing the expertise of
people who deal firsthand with the social and
environmental issues that many academics want to
study.
When dozens of hogs on his and neighboring
farms died after drinking water from Yellow Creek,
he says, he helped start the citizens' group to find out
whether the dumping of wastes by a nearby tannery
might have been the cause.
A university came in with a contract to study
the matter, and declared the evidence to be
inconclusive. Its researchers refused to let local
citizens participate, Mr. Wilson says, because they
wanted their results to be objective.
But his group didn't let the matter rest. It
persuaded Vanderbilt University to train the group's
members to conduct their own survey. Based on the
results, they determined a safe water line and have
taken their grievances to court.
"Just because we don't have all those letters
after our names doesn't mean we can't talk, we can't
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